Explosive radio broadcast Monday, thousands of search results on Tuesday, no results Wednesday, live discussion on a radio program Thursday, 20 minutes later 100,000 results from thousands of websites.

Oh come on. Google doesn't index a page for three days, so it must be censoring prisonplanet.com? I (strongly) call BS. There's no reason at all why Google would do this. What does Google care either way if Charlie Sheen wants to say something?

The article at prisonplanet.com states "To stress again, this is three days after we broke this massive story." The first mention of this I saw in Google News was March 22. It's March 23 now. But let's assume that prisonplanet.com had coverage up three days ago. Google doesn't find the urls this site wants for three days and therefore it must be a cover-up and/or censoring? Anyone who knows about Google knows that different data centers get different data at different times, especially during Bigdaddy.

Later in the article, prisonplanet.com states:

Google has banned its users inside the US and the rest of the world from accessing the Space War website from its search engine. Space War speculated at the time that this was at the behest of the "boys from Beijing."

Begin sarcasm: yeah, prisonplanet.com. That must be it. I'm sure it had nothing to do with hosted doorway pages like

I have nothing personally against prisonplanet.com (I've never heard of them before), but when you don't see a url get crawled for 3-4 days, it doesn't mean that a search engine is trying to oppress you.

when you don't see a url get crawled for 3-4 days, it doesn't mean that a search engine is trying to oppress you.

Yea, it just means Google isn't as fast as other engines when it comes to finding new content.... :)

But seriously, I think many sites are catching on to the idea that screaming Google censorship is the hottest link bait going right now. It doesn't really matter if it's true or not. Byt the time everyone figures out you're full of shit, you already have a ton of new links.

What can be expected from a conspiracy theorist? Well, how about conspiracy theories?

Now if they really looked hard, they might have seen that it *may* be Matt Cutts posting these bait stories, since they provide a perfect lead-in for him to step in as the GoogleGuy with the facts on SPAM SPAM SPAM. Really, Matt. Were you able to dig up those doorway pages that fast, or perhaps you had that research all ready for this "opportunity" to present itself?

Was it really People's Cube crying foul, or was that Matt Cutts setting the stage for another SEO SPAM outing example? After all, it was remarkably coincident with that bad press about China, and all those comments on Matt's FAQ about how ugly it is for him to be outing spammers (and calling for spam reports). How convenient.

And that BMW thing? Really... so convenient to have that chance to "out" a major European spammer just at the time that you had suggested Google would be taking a hard look at non-English language search spam. What was it a mere day or two later that someone outed BMW, and you stepped up to the plate with full details of their tactics? Hmmm... how convenient, eh Matt?

Did you notice the "Occult Elite" link on prisonplanet.com? I didn't know if that was a videogame, or maybe a new band, so I clicked on it: and it took me right back to the original index page. Or did it?!? (insert dramatic music)

You know you could eliminate this whole hosted doorway pages, "borrowing of subdomains" and "trust abuse" thing, if you stopped putting so much weight on authority value, domain age and link age. But if you want to be known as the "older engine" that's 3 days behind everyone else that's cool ;-)

And yeah, TW's cred sometimes takes it in the shorts, but the word "Linkbait" was pretty prominent in the headline. I kind of knew I was going to get a chuckle or two when I clicked through to read it.